2002

Nobel Prize in Physics

A Thirty-Year Deficit Finally Explained

Raymond Davis Jr. · Masatoshi Koshiba · Riccardo Giacconi

Raymond Davis Jr. spent the better part of three decades inside the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota, watching a tank of one hundred thousand gallons of cleaning fluid for signs of neutrinos streaming from the sun — and persistently finding only a third of what theory predicted. This was, for a long time, treated as Davis's problem. It was not: the neutrinos were oscillating between types on the journey, a behaviour requiring them to have mass, which the Standard Model had assured everyone they did not. Masatoshi Koshiba confirmed the deficit with the Kamiokande detector in Japan, and in 1987 caught a burst of neutrinos from a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud — the first time neutrinos from outside the solar system had ever been directly observed. Riccardo Giacconi, working in a quite different corner of the sky, built the first X-ray telescopes and revealed a cosmos blazing in wavelengths invisible from the ground: neutron stars, black holes, galaxy clusters glowing in the dark. Three careers, two entirely new windows onto the universe, and one lesson — that a stubborn thirty-year deficit in a counting experiment is almost always trying to tell you something.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Weighing a Protein Without Killing It

John B. Fenn · Koichi Tanaka · Kurt Wüthrich

Proteins are large, fragile, and violently resistant to conventional analysis: heating them, ionising them, or otherwise roughing them up in the ways mass spectrometry traditionally required simply destroyed the very thing you wished to study. John Fenn and Koichi Tanaka — independently, and by rather different routes — each found ways to coax intact biomolecules gently into the gas phase so that their mass could be measured without tearing them apart; Tanaka famously used a mixture of cobalt powder and glycerol that he was fairly sure would not work, and it did. Kurt Wüthrich meanwhile developed nuclear magnetic resonance techniques to determine protein structures in solution, working out a systematic method for assigning the forest of overlapping NMR signals to specific atoms in the chain. Together, the three gave biochemistry a way to ask what a protein weighs and what shape it takes without first killing it. Drug development, structural biology, and proteomics are still drawing on that gift.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Dying on Cue, Cell by Cell

Sydney Brenner · H. Robert Horvitz · John E. Sulston

In the 1960s, Sydney Brenner was looking for an organism simple enough to study whole and complex enough to matter — a creature whose every cell could be traced from fertilised egg to adult. He settled on Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent one-millimetre nematode that was, and remains, one of the most generous gifts ever offered to biological research. Every adult hermaphrodite has exactly 959 somatic cells; John Sulston painstakingly mapped the fate of every one through every division, producing a complete cell lineage for a multicellular organism for the first time in the history of biology. Robert Horvitz then found the genes that direct certain cells to die deliberately at specific moments during development — a programme of controlled self-destruction that turns out to be as essential to building a body as any act of growth. Without apoptosis, or programmed cell death, embryos do not properly form fingers, immune systems cannot delete self-reactive cells, and cancer cells lose the brake that would otherwise have stopped them. Three researchers, one small worm, and the discovery that dying on cue is among the most important things a cell can do.

Nobel Prize in Literature

A Boy Who Could Not Locate the Wrong

Imre Kertész

Imre Kertész was fourteen when he was deported from Budapest to Auschwitz, and fifteen when the camps were liberated; he spent the next five decades writing about those years with a composure that is itself a kind of argument. His first and most celebrated novel, Fatelessness — published in Hungarian in 1975, largely ignored for years, and only translated into English in 2004 — follows a teenage boy through the camps not with horror or outrage but with a troubling, lucid acceptance, as though the protagonist cannot quite locate the moment when things went wrong. That detachment is the point: Kertész was exploring how totalitarianism deforms the capacity to recognise one's own suffering as suffering. He was writing under a communist government that had little interest in promoting his particular subject, which may partly explain why recognition took so long. The Swedish Academy cited an individual who had upheld the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history — a sentence that rewards sitting with.

Nobel Peace Prize

What an Ex-President Did Next

Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter left the White House in 1981 with approval ratings low enough that a comeback seemed unnecessary to rule out, and spent the following two decades making the case that an ex-presidency could be a more useful institution than the presidency itself. He negotiated ceasefires in Haiti, North Korea, and Bosnia; observed elections in more than thirty countries; built houses with Habitat for Humanity; and led an ultimately successful campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease, a parasite whose victims had previously had few well-placed advocates. The Nobel Committee in Oslo cited his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development — and added, with a precision that was not entirely diplomatic, that the prize should be understood as a support for the values Carter represented at a moment when the world was pursuing other approaches. The remark was widely understood. Carter received the prize at 78 and seemed characteristically untroubled by having waited so long for it.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

The Models Were Missing the People

Daniel Kahneman · Vernon L. Smith

The case for awarding an economics Nobel to a psychologist who had never taken an economics course required some explaining, and the committee was prepared to offer it. Daniel Kahneman, working for decades with his late collaborator Amos Tversky, had mapped in careful experimental detail the ways human decision-making departs from the rational-agent model that underpinned most of mainstream economics — the cognitive illusions, the loss aversion, the sensitivity to framing that makes the same outcome feel like a gain or a loss depending on how it is presented. Vernon Smith, on the other hand, was an economist who had done something economists were not supposed to do: run controlled laboratory experiments with real markets, demonstrating that under the right conditions, simple auctions reliably converge on the price a theorist would predict even when participants know nothing of the theory. The two prizes together delivered a message: yes, markets can work rather well, and also, the people in them are not the people in the models. Economics has been wrestling with that combination ever since.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Beer Foam Obeys a Decay Law

Arnd Leike

Arnd Leike, a physicist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, took a problem that others had dismissed as beneath notice and treated it with the full attention it deserved: he demonstrated, carefully and reproducibly, that the foam on a freshly poured glass of beer collapses over time according to an exponential decay law — the same equation that governs the diminishment of radioactive isotopes, the die-off of bacterial cultures, and the cooling of hot bodies. The half-life varies by beer style, which Leike documented. It is, one must admit, a genuinely elegant experimental system: cheap, available in convenient sample sizes, and requiring no specialist equipment beyond a stopwatch and a modest budget. Leike noted that the phenomenon could serve as a pedagogical tool for introducing students to exponential functions. Students had reached this conclusion independently some time before.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Ostriches Courting the Keeper

Norma E. Bubier · Charles G. M. Paxton · Phil Bowers · D. Charles Deeming

Ostriches reared in captivity on British farms were found, in a formal peer-reviewed study, to direct their courtship displays not at other ostriches but at the human keepers who fed and tended them. The birds — large, fast, and not easily ignored when motivated — performed their full mating repertoire for their attendants, suggesting that early imprinting on humans had rather thoroughly overwritten the species' usual object of affection. The researchers noted that this presented practical difficulties for farm operators attempting to breed them. The ostriches, for their part, appeared committed to the arrangement. It is a finding that gently underlines how much of animal behaviour that looks fixed and innate is in fact assembled from whatever the environment provides at the critical moment — which is a genuinely interesting point, even if the subjects of the study make it difficult to treat with entire gravity.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

The Greeks Already Knew the Asymmetry

Chris McManus

Chris McManus of University College London published a systematic investigation into a subject that classical sculptors had apparently noticed and modern medicine had largely ignored: the asymmetry of the human scrotum. Examining both living subjects and a survey of ancient Greek and Renaissance sculpture, McManus documented that the left testis consistently hangs lower than the right in most men, and that ancient Greek artists had represented this accurately, with a consistency suggesting close observation rather than convention. The paper is earnest, methodical, and entirely serious, which is of course what makes it so difficult to read with a straight face. That the Greeks got it right while medicine was for centuries indifferent to the question says something about the relative attentiveness of art and science to the body, though quite what that something is remains open to interpretation.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Imaginary Numbers, Applied to Accounting

Enron · WorldCom · Xerox

The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to the executives and auditors of Enron, WorldCom, and Xerox for their creative application of the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers to corporate accounting. The formulation is precise in a way that the financial statements were not. Enron had constructed an elaborate system of off-balance-sheet partnerships that hid debt and manufactured earnings; WorldCom had capitalised ordinary operating expenses to inflate profits by nearly four billion dollars; Xerox had accelerated revenue recognition in ways its auditors somehow failed to notice across multiple years. The combined wreckage erased hundreds of billions of dollars in market value, triggered the largest bankruptcy in American history to that point, and prompted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which imposed new obligations on corporate boards and auditors that the companies in question would presumably have found inconvenient had they still existed.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

A Collar That Claimed to Translate Barking

Keita Sato · Matsumi Suzuki · Norio Kogure

The Bow-Lingual device, invented by Keita Sato and colleagues and brought to market by the Japanese toy company Takara, claimed to translate the bark of a dog into one of six emotional categories — happy, sad, frustrated, on-guard, assertive, or needing something — displayed on a small screen. The system used a microphone clipped to the dog's collar, analysed acoustic properties of the vocalisation against a database of recorded barks, and offered its diagnosis within moments. Whether the dog's inner life maps onto a six-category emotional vocabulary that it shares with its owner is a question Bow-Lingual declined to address. That dog owners found comfort in the idea — and that the device sold in meaningful numbers — says something about the human need to feel understood by the beings that live alongside us, even when those beings are primarily interested in squirrels.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

A Pun, Built as Furniture

Theodore Gray

Theodore Gray, a co-founder of Wolfram Research, read that Dmitri Mendeleev's arrangement of the elements was called the periodic table and decided to take the noun literally: he built an actual four-legged wooden table in the shape of the periodic table, with a compartment beneath each element's square to hold a physical sample of it. The project became a years-long quest to collect the elements themselves — the stable ones, at least, the radioactive and the gaseous posing obvious difficulties for a piece of furniture. The result is both a functional table and a chemistry collection you can rest a cup of coffee on. The Ig Nobel committee awarded the Chemistry Prize for a pun pursued with such literal-minded devotion that it became, somewhere along the way, an education.

Ig Nobel Prize in Hygiene

An Automatic Bath for a Reluctant Cat

Eduardo Segura

Eduardo Segura, of the firm Lavakan de Aste, invented an automatic washing machine for cats and dogs: the animal is placed inside, the door sealed, and a cycle of water, shampoo, rinse, and warm-air drying proceeds without further human involvement. The company insisted the process was calming and that the animals emerged clean and unharmed, a claim that anyone who has attempted to bathe a cat by conventional means will greet with a particular scepticism. The engineering was real, the machine sold, and the pets, presumably, formed their own opinions. The Ig Nobel committee awarded the Hygiene Prize, and did not volunteer to demonstrate the device on a live subject.

Ig Nobel Prize in Interdisciplinary Research

An Epidemiology of Navel Lint

Karl Kruszelnicki

Karl Kruszelnicki, a science communicator at the University of Sydney, conducted a survey of navel lint — who accumulates it, of what colour, in what quantity, and why — drawing on nearly five thousand responses to build the first proper epidemiology of belly-button fluff. The findings were oddly specific: the typical accumulator is a slightly older, hairier person, the lint tends toward blue-grey regardless of clothing colour, and it migrates upward, drawn from underwear by body hair acting as a kind of conveyor. The mechanism, once described, is entirely mundane and entirely convincing. The Ig Nobel committee honoured the interdisciplinary reach of a study that combined dermatology, textile physics, and a willingness to ask thousands of strangers to examine their own navels and report back.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

One Reader's Highlighter, Another's Confusion

Vicki Silvers Gier · David S. Kreiner

Vicki Silvers Gier and David Kreiner investigated a hazard familiar to anyone who has ever bought a second-hand textbook: the previous owner's highlighting, applied to the wrong sentences, and its effect on the comprehension of whoever reads the book next. They found that pre-existing inappropriate highlighting measurably impaired readers' understanding, the eye being drawn to the marked passages regardless of whether those passages deserved the emphasis. The finding is a small, genuine contribution to the psychology of reading and attention. The Ig Nobel Prize for Literature recognised the demonstration that a highlighter in the wrong hands is quietly contagious, propagating one reader's misjudgement into the mind of the next.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics

Making an Elephant's Skin Calculable

K. P. Sreekumar · G. Nirmalan

K. P. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan, of Kerala Agricultural University, worked out a method for estimating the total surface area of an Indian elephant — measuring accessible portions of a number of animals and deriving a formula that yields the whole from a few tractable dimensions. The problem is less trivial than it appears: surface area governs heat exchange, drug dosing, and the calculation of how much of anything an animal's skin requires, and an elephant is both large and disinclined to be wrapped in measuring tape. Their formula gave veterinarians and physiologists a usable number where before there had been only guesswork. The Ig Nobel committee honoured the mathematics of the achievement, which rendered one of the planet's largest land animals, at last, calculable.

Turing Award

A Padlock Built From Unfactorable Math

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Ronald L. Rivest · Adi Shamir · Leonard M. Adleman

In 1977, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman — a cryptographer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist working together at MIT — published a paper describing a public-key cryptosystem built on the intractability of factoring the product of two large primes. The idea was conceptually audacious: a system in which you could publish your encryption key to the world without compromising the decryption key, because working backwards from one to the other required solving a problem that would take the fastest computers longer than the age of the universe to brute-force. RSA, as it became known, made secure communication over open networks mathematically thinkable, and therefore practically possible. Every time a browser displays a padlock, every time you type a credit card number into a website, every time two servers negotiate an encrypted session, some descendant of that 1977 paper is doing the work. The Turing Award arrived twenty-five years late, which for a civilisation-altering insight is, by historical standards, rather prompt.

Fields Medal

Bridges No Analogy Quite Survives

Fields Medal

Laurent Lafforgue · Vladimir Voevodsky

The Fields Medal is awarded every four years to mathematicians under forty, which guarantees a certain density of world-historical difficulty in the citations. In 2002, Laurent Lafforgue was honoured for completing the global Langlands correspondence for function fields — a vast and intricate bridge between number theory and the theory of automorphic forms that had been conjectured by Robert Langlands in 1967 and that Lafforgue proved in work spanning hundreds of dense pages. Vladimir Voevodsky received his medal for constructing a homotopy theory for algebraic varieties, a framework that allowed topological methods to operate in purely algebraic settings; he used it to prove Milnor's conjecture, a problem about quadratic forms over fields that had been open for decades. Neither achievement admits a tidy summary, which is perhaps appropriate — mathematics at this altitude exists in a register where even the analogies require a graduate course to follow.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

The Cell's Postal Service, Decoded

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

James Rothman · Randy Schekman

Every living cell runs a constant and remarkably precise postal service — hormones, enzymes, receptors, and signalling molecules packaged into membrane-wrapped vesicles and dispatched to specific destinations inside and outside the cell, without, in the ordinary run of things, going to the wrong address. James Rothman worked out much of the molecular machinery by which vesicles fuse with their target membranes, identifying the protein complexes that act as a kind of zipper between the two membrane surfaces. Randy Schekman, working in yeast, identified the genes that govern the selection, packaging, and budding of vesicles from the endoplasmic reticulum. Together they illuminated a logistics system operating in every cell of every living thing, millions of times a day, at a scale invisible to any microscope then available. The implications turned out to be considerable: disruptions to vesicle trafficking underlie diseases ranging from diabetes to neurodegeneration, and the machinery Rothman and Schekman described became a target for pharmacology within years. They received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013, the Lasker being, as often, a reliable preview.

Perelman posts proof of the Poincaré conjecture

A Proof Posted, Then Silence

In November 2002, Grigori Perelman, a Russian mathematician who had spent several years living quietly in St Petersburg after a period at American universities, posted the first of three preprints to the arXiv server outlining a proof of the Poincaré conjecture — the claim, first posed by Henri Poincaré in 1904, that any closed three-dimensional manifold with no holes is topologically equivalent to a three-sphere. He used Richard Hamilton's Ricci flow, a technique for smoothing the geometry of a manifold over time, and devised a surgery procedure for handling the singularities that arise, which had been the principal obstacle preventing Hamilton from completing the proof himself. Perelman posted the papers without press release or announcement, did not submit them to a journal, and largely declined to explain himself in public. The mathematical community spent roughly three years checking the work, eventually concluding it was correct. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2006 and declined it. The Clay Mathematics Institute offered him a million dollars; he declined that too. Of the seven Millennium Prize Problems Poincaré was the only one solved, which means it is also the only one we know can be solved, which is a comfort of a strictly limited kind.

Quaoar discovered in the Kuiper Belt

Pluto Was Never Alone Out There

On 4 June 2002, Chad Trujillo and Michael Brown, working at the Palomar Observatory, found an object moving slowly against the background stars in the outer solar system and confirmed it as a trans-Neptunian body roughly 1,100 kilometres across — making 50000 Quaoar the largest solar-system object discovered since Pluto was found in 1930. Named after the creation deity of the Tongva people of the Los Angeles basin, Quaoar sits in the Kuiper Belt at about 43 astronomical units from the sun, takes roughly 288 years to complete one orbit, and has a small moon of its own, Weywot, discovered a few years later. Its existence was one of several signals in the early 2000s that the outer solar system was considerably more populous than planetary scientists had assumed — and that Pluto, long treated as an anomalous singleton, was in fact one of a large and growing class of objects. Brown, who would later be known as the man who killed Pluto, was at this point still just finding things.

New insect order Mantophasmatodea described

A New Order, Waiting in a Drawer

In April 2002, a team of entomologists described a new order of insects — the first to be formally recognised since the Grylloblattodea in 1915, making this a genuinely rare event in a field not short of new species but decidedly short of new orders. The creatures, called Mantophasmatodea and nicknamed heelwalkers for their habit of walking on the front of the foot with the heel raised, were wingless, carnivorous, and found in southern Africa — a place that has not lacked for entomological attention. They had first been spotted in amber inclusions from the Eocene and in museum specimens that had been sitting in drawers, unlabelled and unrecognised, for decades. The discovery was a reminder that the history of life does not announce itself tidily and that the natural world is larger than any catalogue we have yet made of it, even in corners where we have been looking for a long time.

Mars Odyssey maps water ice on Mars

Ice Hiding Under the Martian Poles

The 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft, in orbit around Mars since October 2001, began returning data from its gamma-ray spectrometer in early 2002 that showed unusually high concentrations of hydrogen in the top metre of soil near the Martian poles — a pattern consistent with vast shallow deposits of water ice close to the surface. The south polar region in particular appeared to hold enough water ice, if melted, to cover the planet in a shallow global ocean. Mars had been understood for decades to be cold, dry, and unwelcoming, and this finding did not change the current surface conditions; but it substantially revised the planet's water budget and strengthened the case that Mars had once been considerably wetter. It also made the logistics of eventual human presence on Mars slightly less daunting — ice near the surface is more accessible than ice locked deep in the regolith. The Odyssey spacecraft, designed for a nominal two-year mission, was still operating more than a decade later.

Death of Stephen Jay Gould

Three Hundred Essays, None Repeated

Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould died on 20 May 2002 in New York, at sixty years old, of a mesothelioma unrelated to the abdominal cancer from which he had been told in 1982 he would not recover, and from which, defiantly and with the aid of statistics, he had recovered. He co-developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium with Niles Eldredge in 1972 — the argument that evolutionary change tends to occur in rapid bursts separated by long periods of stasis rather than in the slow, uniform progression that a certain reading of Darwin implied — and spent much of the rest of his career arguing with the advocates of strict adaptationism, a dispute that generated considerable heat and not a little personal animosity. He also wrote, without interruption for twenty-seven years, a monthly essay for Natural History magazine: three hundred columns, none repeated, none, he maintained, revised to his full satisfaction. The essays were generous, erudite, and given to treating baseball statistics and Burgess Shale fauna with the same weight of attention. Science writing has been looking for someone to do what he did ever since, and not quite finding them.